It Needs More Jesus: How to Write the Next Christian Hit

My wife listens to Christian music all the time, and I tend to make fun of her for it. I tell her that Christian artists are the rock and roll musicians that just didn’t have the talent to make it in the local cover band. Realizing they had no talent, they dashed out a chord or two on their acoustic guitar and wrote some sappy lyrics about how great God is while they made sure Jesus was mentioned at least every second word or so. And aside from a few outliers, my joking criticism of Christian music holds true for most artists.

Today I was filling up at the local Mississippi Christian gas station the kind that likes to cram their Christianity down your throat whether you like it or not, and I was surprised to hear a Christian song that didn’t quite fit the mold. It still mentioned Jesus saying the name directly several times throughout the song. It spoke of a girl inflexibly attending church. And it spoke of the girl being wildly in love with God and preaching Gods word. But it spoke all of this in the past tense. I was refreshed to hear a “Christian” song lamenting someone losing his or her faith in a real and permanent sort of way.

In most Christian songs or stories, the loss of someone’s faith is the beginning conceit for an annoyingly false narrative of someone showing this poor fallen person the truth and bringing him or her back to God’s grace. But this song did not do that. It left this girl‘s loss of faith unresolved and as such it humanized both the girl’s loss of faith that was treated like a real and difficult issue that the girl needed to resolve on her own and the singer of the song who was not just the deliverer of God’s poetic justice but a real person with real and complicated feelings about this girl. This song builds a relationship between the singer and the girl. You are left feeling the longing and disconnect caused by the growing gap between the two of them. Unfortunately, when people realize that this song doesn’t follow the strict guidelines of typical Christian thought, it will be pulled from the airwaves and it will never be allowed to spark off a much needed renaissance in Christian music. But at least I have just penned the next platinum selling Christian song that will make me a millionaire.

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Published by The.Richard.Braxton

Richard Braxton is a writer struggling with his inner poet. He has fought the poetic urge most of his life, but lately, he has fallen prey to this lifestyle. He creates poetry on a daily basis, and the world is the worse for it.
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